frocks. He was lost for a whole day before he was five, and
nearly drowned in the reservoir of the new water-works before he
was seven. He had a real pistol taken away from him by a real
policeman when he was ten. And he learnt to smoke, not with
pipes and brown paper and cane as Tom had done, but with a penny
packet of Boys of England American cigarettes. His language
shocked his father before he was twelve, and by that age, what
with touting for parcels at the station and selling the Bun Hill
Weekly Express, he was making three shillings a week, or more,
and spending it on Chips, Comic Cuts, Ally Sloper's Half-holiday,
cigarettes, and all the concomitants of a life of pleasure and
enlightenment. All of this without hindrance to his literary
studies, which carried him up to the seventh standard at an
exceptionally early age. I mention these things so that you may
have no doubt at all concerning the sort of stuff Bert had in
him.

He was six years younger than Tom, and for a time there was an
attempt to utilise him in the green-grocer's shop when Tom at
twenty-one married Jessica--who was thirty, and had saved a
little money in service. But it was not Bert's forte to be
utilised. He hated digging, and when he was given a basket of
stuff to deliver, a nomadic instinct arose irresistibly, it
became his pack and he did not seem to care how heavy it was
nor where he took it, so long as he did not take it to its
destination. Glamour filled the world, and he strayed after it,
basket and all. So Tom took his goods out himself, and sought
employers for Bert who did not know of this strain of poetry in
his nature. And Bert touched the fringe of a number of trades in
succession--draper's porter, chemist's boy, doctor's page, junior